


The Gift of Poison

by Strickenized



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: M/M, dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 20:37:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9842765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Strickenized/pseuds/Strickenized
Summary: After swallowing the darvon cocktail from the Loyalists, Corvo must now make his case for a second chance at life. But what could he possibly offer the Outsider?





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was a commissioned oneshot from my roommate with the express request to post it here!

"Corvo." 

The single word existed in a vacuum, without echo or life. It carried a crushing weight that forced the assassin into a dull, dreary awareness, where his sole confidant was a lamp post spilling its sallow light over broken cobblestones. He started, and his vision lurched - the already disjointed landscape of the Void shifted its many islands tauntingly. Fear gripped him at once; did he die?

The events of the evening unspooled in a scattered mess. He recalled the greeting from Lord Pendleton handing him a glass, another over-imaginative drawing from Emily, Havelock and Martin exchanging loaded glances. He recalled the Gristol cider's bitter taste growing ever sharper, almost citrus-like in its bite, and he knew his fate in that moment. He knew that, if he exclaimed his realization, Havelock would have put a bullet in his back without question; their plan would persevere no matter Corvo's machinations. They cared not if they spilled his blood in front of Emily. It was, he thought, all he could do to save face and stumble up to his room feigning ignorance.

And now, the Void. And now, the Outsider. And now, the lecture over his life.

Sighing through his nose, the assassin waited for the summary of all his failures and accomplishments.

But no such lecture arrived. "Corvo," came the sound again, dead syllables raining down on him. "Here you are, poisoned by your own allies and left for dead on a raft. From the murder of your Empress to the death of the High Overseer, many would look on your murder as fortunate. Even now, your erstwhile associates are moving on the capital to install Emily as the new empress. Yet here you are, resigned to death. Are you truly willing to end your narrative here, Corvo? With Emily in the clutches of the men who betrayed you?"

_Do I have a choice?_ The Serkonan looked to where the Outsider was to find nothing but a whale in the distance. There it hung motionless, frozen in time against scenes a thousand years prior and a thousand years further. It unsettled him, as did the voice that perpetually sounded in his own mind.

"You wear my mark on your hand and yet you ask me if you have a choice." While he never laughed, Corvo sensed levity in the tone. He felt a presence near his side, where the Outsider knelt above him. "That depends. How much are you willing to give for that second chance at life?

"Many have beseeched me for this very choice, Corvo. People the world over spent their life's fortunes on whale bone charms and runes in hopes of gaining my favors. They carved their wishes into rats and boiled them alive, hoping the bloated carcasses would deliver their messages unto me in the Void." His hands folded over one knee, and he pushed himself up - a strange choice of gesture that looked too deliberate to Corvo. "But maybe you're not the type of man to take a second chance at mortality. Maybe you're content to let the rest of fate unspool itself in the hands of Havelock, Martin, and Pendleton. Emily may survive on her own. She is a lot like you, after all."

Struggling, Corvo sat upright. He reached for the back of the Outsider's pant leg, fully expecting his fingers to meet dead air, and yet he caught the fabric. At first, the words stuck in his throat, his abject surprise at his simple luck (was it luck? Was it choice? Whose choice?) forcing his throat to stall. "Wait," he managed at last. "Don't go."

The Outsider hardly turned his head before the very form of him dissolved in an unearthly manner. The fabric slipped from his fingers, draining from his grasp like water. A thin wetness remained on his fingertips. Panic set in past the throbbing numbness wrought by the poison. "Wait!" His strength ebbed and flowed with each pulse, as death worked its way through him. He wondered, then - how long did he have before he became a part of this place? How long before all of his efforts meant nothing for his country? Soon he would die a dishonored man, afloat on a raft to the Flooded District. Soon he would know a marred reputation in history forevermore, as the murderer of the Empress - the bane of Dunwall.

"I'll do anything you want - I'll rewrite history, or fell the Abbey, or even spread your name from Morley to Serkonos! Whatever it is you're after, just name it!" He struggled to his feet only to hear his words echo back to him from the infinite wastes of the Void. The Outsider left, his back forever turned -- 

"I find your offers wanting, Corvo. I don't care to be known, nor do I find any preoccupation with the Abbey or its thousand grudges against me. Rewriting history falls beyond your boundary. 

"Was I wrong to have Marked you?"

Incensed, Corvo wrenched around to seize the throat of the Outsider and felt his fingers close over gentle heat and solid muscle. He felt like no wraith, no apparition sent to haunt his dreams - and this scared him all the more that he already met his fate. Now the Outsider toyed with him and taunted him for all the choices he could no longer make now that he was excised from the world. He squeezed with the strength that he still possessed, and found in his wake a dead smile to match dead eyes. Corvo reached with both hands now, and his grip turned white around the neck of Daud's Black-eyed Bastard. On his forearms settled a grip disturbingly weak, almost boyish in its lack of power and --

Corvo realized, then, the folly of choking out that which does not breathe.

"I'm waiting, Corvo." His lips moved, yet the assassin felt no whisper of air beneath his fingers. Nothing moved, not even a pulse. "Every night you spent since your escape from Dunwall Tower, I visited you. I questioned you, and I appraised you for the choices you would make. I gave you just enough insight into the consequences to pressure your decisions. Your actions were your own, yet it was my presence that dogged you through the whole of it - that afforded you the power to overcome your adversaries. It must have incensed you - knowing that, all this time, you had me to thank for the possibility of choice. 

"Now, at last, you have me in your grip. What will you do?" The Outsider offered no further resistance. Where they stood now, Corvo could just as easily snap his neck as any mortal man that crossed his path. This creature, this otherworldly being, the source of his _power_ felt all too human in his grip.

So Corvo pressed on, forcing the god back through his own realm. The scattered streets of Dunwall unraveled into a setting far older, far bleaker than any he encountered in the plague-infested districts. No frozen weepers or static mountains of corpses littered the area, yet he tasted a sharp sense of sorrow on the air. This ageless place possessed a feeling, where the Void was otherwise bereft of emotion. Yet Corvo only noticed the change of scenery when the Outsider's legs pressed up against a low wall, and Corvo halted in his advance.

Here, they were encircled by hundreds of timestopped men, all robed, all cheering soundlessly with fists forever raised. While his hands tired with the effects of the poison, Corvo never slackened his grip. The low wall, he found, was an altar. He wasted no time in forcing the Outsider down upon its sturdy surface. "Take me back to Dunwall," he commanded as he leaned his weight into his attack.

"We're --"

"I didn't _ask_ where we are. I said, take me _back_. You owe me that much." He realized, then, the folly of trying to choke out that which did not breathe. He released his grip, though he did not back away from the fallen form of the Void's god. 

And the Outsider made no effort to right himself. He stretched his arms far above his head, exacerbating his vulnerability. "We're in one of the oldest parts of the Void. This was where I died." He looked toward the knife that Corvo could not see. "They cut my throat in a ritual that would cast me into the Void. Four thousand years of history changed because of them. You would throw all that away to break my neck? You fascinate me."

Corvo could think of nothing else to do. He had nothing to offer a god that the rest of the world could not - his connections, his strengths, his weaknesses all meant nothing in the view of four thousand years of watching the world turn. But the Outsider was once a man, which meant he could still be a man, even as he stared out at Corvo through nothing but darkness. He had Piero for philosophical debate, Daud for serial murder, and doubtless many more to sate every part of his twisted psyche. So what could Corvo trade in turn for another day in Dunwall?

Surrounded by sightless eyes, with the Outsider prostrate before him, Corvo could think of no other option. Desperation fueled him as he reached for the deceptively simple coat and wrenched it upward. He half-expected to find nothing but blackness beneath, but there lay taut skin over ribs swollen with breath. His fingers traced ridges and valleys as he forced the fabric upward until he found the basins of the Outsider's arms. Corvo leaned against him now, trusting his weight to the Outsider, and found him just as solid as before. Still, it bothered him. He shook it off to free the other man from his coat, and cast it upon the nearest pair of eyes.

"Does everything change for you when you can _feel_ me watching?" The irony was palpable in his tone.

"You tell me." Corvo knew acutely that the Outsider surveyed him now, that those depthless black eyes lighted upon him with the most pronounced interest yet. He knew this, and chose not to look. Instead, he leaned down against the surprising warmth of the other man, and while swallowing his own apprehension for the act, pressed lips to the Outsider's throat. He felt fear in doing so, which fueled a misbegotten thrill. Ignoring it, he pressed a hand to the underside of the Outsider's jaw and pressed for more room. Teeth grazed over territories paved by his lips, and he felt a peculiar heat in his left hand as he worked. A shudder passed through the god's skin and he felt the rumble of breath, as if he was beginning to recall how it felt to be human once.

There came no response, but the body beneath him slowly woke to life. A hand clasped over his wrist, and he felt the Outsider's thumb forge a gentle path from wrist to palm. Breath wetted the fingers that strayed too close to his mouth, and Corvo felt the Outsider's tongue upon his fingertips. Again, he pushed the welling revolt from his mind. There wasn't a place for regret and disgust when his life hinged on making a favorable impression. So when he felt the body beneath him rock against his form, he made no mention of it.

And he wanted to ignore it entirely for the moment, but the Outsider had other plans - namely, the possession of his marked arm. His hand moved beyond his volition, pathing downward across skin to the lip of the other man's pants. Corvo loosed himself from his ministrations for a moment. "I get the hint." As he spoke, gooseflesh roused on slick skin. Swaths of red marked the areas that Corvo traversed.

He knew then, perhaps through the Outsider supplanting his wants into Corvo's thoughts, to move further. He moved from neck, where his teeth seized the handlebar that was the Outsider's collar. His left hand struggled for dexterity with the unseen buttons until assisted by his otherworldly companion. In a couple sparing seconds, their clothing simply melted away.

Now Corvo was faced with the brunt of his choice - lying out stark naked upon the stone altar, animate beneath the frozen descent of the knife. He knew a surfeit of choices concerning the ends of men's lives - powerful men with world-changing agendas - yet he was never faced with a duty quite so otherworldly as this. The Outsider's affairs were always unknown to him, and he preferred their contact minimal at best. Yet here, he faced a choice of life by pleasing something that he wasn't sure was human. There wasn't time to prepare himself for this.

Corvo caught up a leg in his roughened grip, and hoisted the limb high until the back of the Outsider's knee met with his shoulder. The joints fit unnervingly well against each other, and briefly Corvo speculated that the other man was able to manipulate his own anatomy to some extent. 

"Would you settle for serendipity?" A smirk, and those waiting eyes fell upon him again.

The heel of his unmarked hand braced against inner thigh, and forcing the other man's legs open proved easy. Corvo even felt the strain of muscles as they reached the end of their flexibility. Waiting beneath him was the Outsider's cock, remarkably not crooked as the turns of phrase suggested. Perhaps he would have made comment of it if his current predicament hadn't left them as strange bedfellows. But the Outsider sensed the hesitation, and again his left hand began to drift from the Outsider's knee to upper thigh to the crown of his cock, where thumb pressed firmly into wanton flesh.

"Fine," Corvo muttered, reclaiming control of his hand. He seized his own cock, and found it already slick, though he knew not how or why. He learned to stop questioning such matters here. His fingers grew wet with the contact, enough so that he could press them inside his proposed bedmate without great resistance. He knew not what to expect in tactile response, but the smooth, long undulation of heat ranked not among forecasted outcomes. He thought little of it, forcing himself to identify a fragmented building in the distance. A second finger joined the first, then a third. He pressed skyward and heard a stuttered gasp from the Outsider.

Perhaps there was reassurance in that he was human enough to feel such a move.

As his three fingers swept against smooth muscle, the Outsider arched slowly in response. The silence between them felt laden with unsaid expectations and bated observance. He pressed with greater vigor against the other man's prostate and earned a strained gasp of it. If nothing else, this arrangement offered Corvo the opportunity for revenge. Such a thought spurred him from toeing his choice tepidly.

But when he pressed himself into the Outsider, he felt a tight pressure on him unlike anything experienced with women in his life. He ventured into a trap where the Outsider constricted him tantalizingly, and Corvo stopped himself to catch his breath. Pressure built up alarmingly quickly at the base of his spine. "Loosen up."

The Outsider, conversely, looked to thrive on the pain. "Having trouble, Corvo?"He leered down at the other man from his place on the altar.

"If you don't cut me some slack, I'll cum." The statement earned enough of a response that he could move again. Surprisingly, no mocking comment or bored analysis came with his suggestion. Corvo resumed a slow, rocking motion to test his boundaries and found the Outsider almost bored beneath him. But the Outsider proved patient, and Corvo knew this for all the hours spent mapping guard patrols when he felt black eyes upon him. They never abated even when Corvo never moved for half a day, so why should that patience fail him here?

As Corvo himself loosened up, he drew deeper into his otherworldly partner. His hands framed the bony ribcage stretched taut before him, and the Outsider's hands lay unrestrained above his head. Seizing on the idea he had before, Corvo trusted his weight more fully to his partner in a subtle shift, then framed his unmarked hand around the man's throat. The skin still felt warm, smick. He very nearly gleaned a pulse beneath his flesh. Again he squeezed, and this time he felt a response in how the Outsider tightened up around him, choking him in return, stealing his breath away --

Corvo jerked the black-eyed man upright by the neck, and in a practiced rearrangement, shifted himself atop the altar while forcing the Outsider beyond its bounds, and there the other man arched backward in a rare display of vulnerability. Both the Outsider's hands splayed against the slate-covered ground to maintain balance in the demanding position, and every muscle in his body grew taut with careful balance. Corvo shuddered responsively, again fighting back against a tepid climax. With the Outsider's legs now arranged around his lap, Corvo seized one of his thighs in a long, raking grip, His marked hand palmed against the flat of the Outsider's stomach, forcing him to hold the position while taking repeated, jolting thrusts. 

No matter the strength in which Corvo railed against his partner's hips, the Outsider never complained of the punishment. And it came to be that Corvo pushed himself too far to regain his composure. In a hoarse moan, he forced himself deep into his god-lover as all muscles seized, and gritted his teeth against the nigh insurmountable pleasure of release. Red rutted nail marks turned deep red with new beads of blood on the Outsider's thigh. His flattened palm curled into a fist against the other man's stomach, and in their wake lay five distinct marks as arrows pointing to the very center of him. Slowly Corvo's muscles slackened, and heavy thrusts dulled to a languid rocking while the last of his orgasm petered out.

But the Outsider was patient, and while he remained tantalizingly near to cumming himself, he wondered with interest how Corvo might address the lack of release on his end. He needn't wait long, however, as a rough hand closed over his waiting cock and set to work before Corvo even separated himself from the black-eyed man. For this, he almost smiled.

"The choices you make are quite interesting, Corvo." He spoke in the same, carefully-measured tones as with their first meeting. With each stroke, he felt the revival of long-forgotten habits from more human times, when he knew blood and pain and fear. These specters were dangerous, he knew, but he welcomed them regardless. As he opened himself to the idea, he drew long breaths into his dead husk. With each passing respiration, he felt more a visitor in his own Void. The deep, burgeoning want grew as Corvo reached a more vigorous pace, and soon the Outsider felt almost human.

While the Outsider tried to sit up during Corvo's ministrations, the heel of a hand met the bottom of his ribs with brute force at every occasion. Were he a lesser man, were he a man at all, the Outsider felt certain that the force alone would've shattered his floating ribs. At this, he _did_ finally smile. Soon his breaths quickened, his muscles tightened, and he flexed his hands against the ground in wait for the inevitable.

And for the Outsider, the thought of climax remained a question in his mind. Did he still retain that much humanity?

He did not wait long for his answer; Corvo's vigor was matched only by his stamina, and in minutes, release seized the Outsider's body in three undulating strokes. Only shuddering breaths left his body, accompanied by fragments of wrung-out, tightened fragments of voice. It was then, perhaps, that Corvo realized what whale oil resembled most. As the thick strands of cum cooled against the black-eyed man's skin, their opalescent gleam shined at him tauntingly. Another breath passed between them and they vanished altogether - along with the Outsider.

Before Corvo found time to react, a voice sounded behind him. He turned to find the patron god of the Void floating as he often did, entirely clothed and unruffled by the encounter. The barest hint of smirk remained in his features. "Do what you will with your second chance. I'll be watching." Before he quite finished his last syllable, the whole of the Void vanished in a whorling, sucking vortex.

And as soon as his disorientation ended, Corvo opened his eyes to two vapor masks belonging to the whalers - and cursed his luck.

He cursed the Outsider's crooked cock, too.

 


End file.
